The stillness of the studio portrait

A plastic stool in front of a stark white wall. I sat down. Adjusting my hair, putting on a blank expression, I signalled to the local studio photographer that he could go ahead and take my passport photo. And I suddenly remembered a beautiful portrait of my grandmother at 21, taken at some forgotten, probably defunct studio.

Passport photos have done one thing for us as a species: they make it amply clear that every human being has the capacity to look exceedingly surly, shocked or dispirited. Perhaps this is the truth about how the bureaucracy that asks for these photos treats us. All the portraiture we have now is the selfie, the occasional candid shot by a talented friend, or the blandly bureaucratic passport photo. The democracy of technology, with a camera phone in every pocket, has taken from most of us the subtle and painstaking art of the studio portrait.

Bombay’s own photographic history stretches back to the 1840s, when the technology first sailed around the Cape of Good Hope from Europe. 1854 brought together pioneering photography enthusiasts to work on understanding this new art and science, forming the Bombay Photographic Society. It was no inconsiderable effort. Some early photographic technologies called for exposure times of three to seven minutes for a sharp image; heat and humidity had catastrophic effects on photographic plates and paper, causing cracks, splits and fungus growth; equipment was back-breakingly heavy; and photographic chemicals were difficult and expensive to store and carry, since they were highly inflammable.

Nonetheless, the verisimilitude of their results meant that portrait photography soon developed a flourishing market of people keen to immortalise their own faces. Lindley and Warren, one famous Bombay photo studio of the 19th century, was well known for portraiture, particularly on cartes-devisite— akin to business cards that included photographs. In 1865, they advertised a new technology of ‘Diamond Cameo Cards’, patented only a year before in London. This complicated process resulted in four oval-shaped portraits of the subject, taken from different angles, printed on a single card. Good photographic results needed both luck and skill during the long exposure time. Indoor portraits insulated the posing person from the disturbance of wind or background movement. But subjects still had to be motionless (often using hidden headrests and supportive props), and exposures had to be in focus.

The photographer could only detect an error after the entire process of printing was done. This was hard enough with a single image; getting four perfectly right, printed on one card, was verging on miraculous. Holders of Diamond Cameo cards were definitely entitled to brag.

A more recent miracle of studio photography comes from the First Holy Communion studio portraits of Catholic children that were particularly popular between the 1940s and 1970s. Bombay studios with Catholic clientele were adept at creating these: a photographic image of a child kneeling and praying, with the Jesus or the Blessed Virgin Mary looking down on them benevolently. The religious iconography was painted, in delicately tinted watercolours, by artists with skilled brushes. Invoking an air of sanctity in recalcitrant seven- or eightyear-olds must have required an entirely different kind of ability in the photographer. These photos were taken directly after long church services, children marched over to the studio, dressed in stiff formal clothes, little girls in itchy veils too. A parent would look on sternly, while siblings fidgeted outside. It’s an underappreciated genre that speaks of the eye of the experienced photographer to release the shutter at just the right moment, because most such images look nothing less than angelic.

I went home from the studio and took out my grandmother’s portrait. The light of that very long-ago studio illuminated her face— young, fresh, earnest, a strange woman not my grandmother. But with eyes and an expression that sometimes look out from other family faces, including my own. She was still and silent, waiting. I was too. The unknown photographer released the shutter. I looked at the print, and we were in that moment together.

A plastic stool in front of a stark white wall. I sat down. Adjusting my hair, putting on a blank expression, I signalled to the local studio photographer that he could go ahead and take my passport photo. And I suddenly remembered a beautiful portrait